Vedi Preface

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by Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn

Reti Medievali Rivista, 13, 1 (2012)

<http://rivista.retimedievali.it>

Preface

Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, 1080-1100

Umberto Longo, Lila Yawn (eds.)

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The articles in Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, a monographic sec-tion of «Reti Medievali - Rivista», are the first fruits of a long-term, collab-orative, multidisciplinary research project on papal schisms and the con-struction of memory, which began in 2010. The spark that ignited the enterprise was an informal conversation between two colleagues, a Roman historian of the Middle Ages, who at the time was in the initial stages of writing a book about medieval antipopes; and an American-born historian of medieval art, who knew virtually nothing about them. Thanks to her interlocutor, the art historian rapidly realized that this blind spot, a com-mon feature in existing histories of the art of the period, was both analyti-cally debilitating and a powerful demonstration of the long-term efficacy of what could be called «anti-papalization»: the posthumous erasing and demonizing of men who, in their own time, were regarded as rightful pon-tiffs by some part of Christendom but who were outlived or otherwise defeated by their rivals and then permanently stigmatized as enemies of the Church.

This dialogue of 2010 between Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri of the Università di Urbino «Carlo Bo» and Lila Yawn of John Cabot University and the American Academy in Rome rapidly expanded into a conversazione a

quattro and then a cinque, drawing in other researchers interested in the

eleventh- and twelfth-century papacy, above all Umberto Longo of Sapienza-Università di Roma, Kai-Michael Sprenger of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, and Thomas J.H. McCarthy of New College of Florida. The discussions of this enlarged circle were enlivened by a recent flowering of interest in medieval antipopes and the manipulation of collective memory, notable in the initiatives of the «Damnatio memoriae» interdisciplinary

Preface

by Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn

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research group at the University of Zurich1_{; in the recently published acts of}

the conference held in 2008 at Ascoli Piceno2_{; in the project underway at}

Aachen under the direction of Harald Müller3_{; in Mary Stroll’s then}

forth-coming book on eleventh-century popes and antipopes4_{; and in Roberto}

Rusconi’s Santo Padre (2010), particularly the section on the reputed sancti-ty of Clement III/Wibert of Ravenna5_{. The underlying issues of collective}

memory and the ways in which it could be cancelled or transformed were given special immediacy, meanwhile, by news of the Arab Spring – of nearby countries struggling, often violently, with internal rifts and the specters of newly defunct regimes – and by Osama bin Laden’s swift, calculated burial at sea.

Through our exchanges, a constellation of issues began to take shape that seemed both methodologically urgent and rich in historical potential. The medieval papacy was marked by sporadic, sometimes protracted and often profound schisms involving two or more simultaneous claimants to the papal throne, each with his own supporters and election (another issue of great interest to us). How, then, did the papal line come to seem a tidy sequence? During most papal schisms there were diametrically opposed opinions about which of the rival claimants was the legitimate pope. What means were used, then, to brand one of the contenders as a fraud and a villain in perpetuity while securing his opponent’s lasting image as the authentic successor of St. Peter? How, in short, did someone become an antipope, a title that none of the men in question, including those now long called by that epithet, would ever have willingly accepted?

From the beginning we knew that the answers were elusive, in some cases infinitely so. The damning of a dead pope’s memory – that is, the construc-tion of a lasting, widespread, and emphatically negative image of his person

Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, 1080-1100

1_{On the international interdisciplinary research group “Damnatio memoriae – Deformation und}

Gegenkonstruktion von Erinnerung in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur” see: <http://www.damnatio-memoriae.net/ziele-aims.html> [last accessed 15 June 2012]. Important initiatives about historical memory in other periods are also currently underway, for example the “Memoria Romana” project directed by Karl Galinsky <http://www.utexas.edu/research/memoria> [last accessed 15 June 2012]; and the Historical Justice and Memory Research Network of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research in Melbourne, Australia: <http://www.historicaljusticeandmemorynetwork.net>[last accessed 15 June 2012].

2_{Condannare all’oblio: pratiche della damnatio memoriae nel Medioev. Atti del convegno di}

studio svoltosi in occasione della XX Edizione del Premio internazionale Ascoli Piceno: Ascoli Piceno, Palazzo dei Capitani, 27-29 novembre 2008, ed. by I. Lori Sanfilippo and A. Rigon, Roma 2010.

3 _{On the major conference held in September 2011:}

<http://www.histinst.rwth-aachen.de/aw/cms/HISTINST/Zielgruppen/mittelalter/~vwv/gegenpaepste_tagung/?lang=de > [last accessed 15 June 2012]. See also Gegenpäpste. Ein unerwünschtes mittelalterliches

Phänomen, ed. by H. Müller and B. Hotz, Köln, in press [2012].

4_{M. Stroll, Popes and Antipopes. The Politics of Eleventh Century Church Reform,}

Leiden-Boston 2012.

5_{R. Rusconi, Santo padre. La santità del papa da san Pietro a Giovanni Paolo II, Roma 2010,}

p. 40-50.

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and pontificate – was nearly always accompanied by a thorough purge, a

deletio: the destruction of the output of his chancery; the effacing of pertinent

inscriptions and images; the disposal of his corpse in an unmarked grave or in an inaccessible place. What information survived was nearly always of a polemical nature, portraying him as a devil or, at the very least, as an ill-intentioned loser whose ultimate demise, like that of all evil, was both just and inevitable.

Researching in this void created long ago and filled with distorted images would clearly require something more than our habitual individual methods. For that reason, we decided to pool our intellects, bibliographies, and research skills and to work together across disciplines, as we did in our first joint venture, a conference – or rather an «anti-conference», as we affection-ately called it – about Clement III/Wibert of Ravenna, organized by Lila Yawn at John Cabot University in April of 20116_{. Wibert was elected pope in}

1080 by the philo-imperial Synod of Brixen to replace the (theoretically) deposed Gregory VII and was consecrated pope with the name Clement III in March of 10847_.

Clement was an obvious, if perhaps also an audacious, choice for our first group enterprise, the beginning of what we intend to be a multi-year endeavor that builds upon our personal specialties and varied approaches to the same problems and sources (documentary, narrative, iconographic, epi-graphic, monumental). Clement was one of the two most powerful and influ-ential eleventh- and twelfth-century pontiffs the Church now considers antipopes; the other was Anacletus II (1130-1138), about whom we will hold an international conference in Rome in April of 2013. Clement had an unusually long pontificate and was opposed by four decidedly high-profile popes who made it into the canon: Gregory VII (1073-1085), Victor III (1086-1087), Urban II (1088-1099), and Paschal II (1099-1118). As pope, Clement retained his title as archbishop of Ravenna, which gave him con-siderable influence in northern Italy, and had a significant following both in Rome and abroad during a ventennio that was especially crucial for papal-imperial relations and the reform of the Church. He was also regarded by some as a saint. After his death there were reports of miracles at his tomb. They were soon cut short, however, by Paschal II, who had his corpse exhumed and thrown in the Tiber.

Popes through the Looking Glass, or «Ceci n’est pas un pape»

6_{The conference was generously supported by the president and art department of John Cabot}

University and by the university’s special events staff. We are also indebted to Caroline Washburn and Sarah Sanders of Cornell University for preparing the logo and program: <http://www.johncabot.edu/about_jcu/news_and_events/conferences/Framing-Clement-III.aspx>[last accessed 15 June 2012].

7_{For the date of the conference we chose the anniversary of Clement’s imperial crowning of}

Henry IV in St. Peter’s Basilica, which also happened to coincide with our modern April Fool’s Day. In 1084 it was Easter Monday. Henry had been consecrated by Clement the previous day (I.S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056-1106, Cambridge 1999, p. 230).

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Historical scholarship about Clement III/Wibert of Ravenna is very lim-ited. We owe this shortage in part to the sparse and biased primary record, which resulted from the remarkably thorough damnatio memoriae carried out after his death. Yet it also comes from the tendency, pronounced in the history of art but also present to varying degrees in other varieties of history, to accept the confessional construct of a clear-cut, unitary papal line and to forget that some (anti)popes were at least as powerful, active, pontifical, and potentially victorious as their now-canonical rivals.

That issue is the subject of Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri’s prole-gomenon to our studies8_{. With a title evoking both Lewis Carroll and René}

Magritte, whose fantasy worlds densely entwine reality, perception, fiction, and representation, this opening chapter sets forth the overall theme of the monographic section and invites readers to invert what many histories look-ing back over the period take as a default point of view. Instead of assesslook-ing past events on the basis of hindsight, as if history had a predetermined end, Carpegna Falconieri urges us to analyze past events (those of the popes and antipopes serve as a test case) «as if we were inside of them, as if we ourselves were anchored in that distant present, frozen in the still frame along with the contenders, when the possibilities were still virtually infinite and the end of the story had yet to be written». With a Shakespearean oxymoron, Umberto Longo’s title, A Saint of Damned Memory, sums up the posthumous reputa-tion of Clement III, who after death was venerated as a saint by his adherents and reviled as a heresiarch by his adversaries. These diametrically opposed images serve in Longo’s analysis as a mirror and paradigm of the eleventh-century Church reform, which was far more multifaceted and composite than scholarship of the finalistic kind has accustomed us to envisioning. In The

Tiara in the Tiber, Kai-Michael Sprenger fathoms an episode of histoire événementielle, the disinterment of Clement III’s remains and their disposal

in the Tiber, against the depths of the longue durée. By examining cases of the river’s use as a place of punishment and oblivion from Roman antiquity to the twentieth century, Sprenger brings out another seeming contradiction – namely, the very memorability of public acts of deletion, with their collec-tive rituals of purification and defamation. Deletion is also at the center of Lila Yawn’s chapter, which associates the suppression of Clement III’s mem-ory with a physical place, the basilica of S. Clemente in Rome. Applying the principle of «history from the inside», Yawn ponders whether the well-known frescoes celebrating St. Clement I in the lower basilica were commis-sioned by supporters of Clement III, rather than by his enemies as the long-standing consensus holds, and also whether the destruction of the church

8_{Lila Yawn gave the articles a first round of editing, translated those of Tommaso di Carpegna}

Falconieri and Umberto Longo into English, and wrote this introduction in close consultation with Umberto Longo and the other authors. We look forward to the future publication of Thomas J.H. McCarthy’s study of perspectives on Clement III in German chronicles, which was also pre-sented in a preliminary form at the 2011 conference at John Cabot University.

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soon after Clement’s death, like the jettisoning of his body in the Tiber, was a response to his nascent cult of miracles. In contrast to the emperor’s attire in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, the New Clothes of Yawn’s title are highly visible elements of a sartorial and physiognomic overhaul of Clement I in the upper basilica, which preempted any association of the new church and its first-century dedicatee with Clement III.

These collected studies are not intended as a systematic treatment of the life and times of Clement III/Wibert of Ravenna or of his immediate post-mortem misfortunes. Our aim instead was and is to view the available evi-dence through new eyes – or rather through very old ones, according to Carpegna Falconieri’s formulation – and, in so doing, to bring out formerly unrecognized possibilities, in some cases about familiar things: about the eleventh-century reform, for instance; about the expunction of the ancient basilica of S. Clemente from the landscape; and about Clement III’s second burial, with its apparent analogies to Paschal II’s legendary exorcism of the ghost of Nero. With these examples and their methodological introduction, we have sought to set a course for our own future work on «anti-papaliza-tion» and related questions, including our contributions to the April 2013 conference on Anacletus II, which will also host a variety of other speakers, with their own approaches and methods. We are grateful for and gratified by the opportunity to publish our «anti-papers» in «Reti Medievali - Rivista» and wish to thank the editors, the anonymous peer-reviewers, the friends and colleagues who gave us much invaluable feedback, and, of course, the future readers of our articles. Our sincere hope is that these articles will be the beginning of a rich conversation about a topic whose underlying questions concerning the making, unmaking, and remaking of shared memory are both medieval and still very much with us.

Umberto Longo

Università di Roma La Sapienza umberto.longo@uniroma1.it Lila Yawn

John Cabot University (Rome) lila.yawn@gmail.com

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The articles in Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, a monographic sec-tion of «Reti Medievali - Rivista», are the first fruits of a long-term, collab-orative, multidisciplinary research project on papal schisms and the con-struction of memory, which began in 2010. The spark that ignited the enterprise was an informal conversation between two colleagues, a Roman historian of the Middle Ages, who at the time was in the initial stages of writing a book about medieval antipopes, and an American-born historian of medieval art, who knew virtually nothing about them. Thanks to her interlocutor, the art historian rapidly realized that this blind spot, a com-mon feature in existing histories of the art of the period, was both analyti-cally debilitating and a powerful demonstration of the long-term efficacy of what could be called «anti-papalization»: the posthumous erasing and demonizing of men who, in their own time, were regarded as rightful pon-tiffs by some part of Christendom but who were outlived or otherwise defeated by their rivals and then permanently stigmatized as enemies of the Church.

This dialogue of 2010 between Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri of the Università di Urbino «Carlo Bo» and Lila Yawn of John Cabot University and the American Academy in Rome rapidly expanded into a conversazione a

quattro and then a cinque, drawing in other researchers interested in the

eleventh- and twelfth-century papacy, above all Umberto Longo of Sapienza-Università di Roma, Kai-Michael Sprenger of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, and Thomas J.H. McCarthy of New College of Florida. The discussions of this enlarged circle were enlivened by a recent flowering of interest in medieval antipopes and the manipulation of collective memory, notable in the initiatives of the «Damnatio memoriae» interdisciplinary

Preface

by Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn

Reti Medievali Rivista, 13, 1 (2012) <http://rivista.retimedievali.it> ISSN 1593-2214 ©2012 Firenze University Press DOI 10.6092/1593-2214/354 Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, 1080-1100 Umberto Longo, Lila Yawn (eds.)

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